Exceptional Works: Doug Wheeler

DN ND WD 180 EN - NY 24 (2024) is a new installation by Doug Wheeler. On view is an immersive environment by the artist that further expands on his groundbreaking investigations of the possibilities of luminous space.

Presented in the exhibition Doug Wheeler: Day Night Day, DN ND WD 180 EN - NY 24 distills the phenomenon of perceiving day and night as simultaneously occurring over the expanse of the sky while in flight. The artist has described how, while flying an airplane, he would sometimes see daylight on the distant horizon in one direction, and if he turned his plane 180 degrees, the darkness of night on the opposite horizon. Wheeler’s experiences with flying go back to his childhood, when he would frequently travel by plane with his father, a doctor who cared for patients throughout remote areas of North central Arizona where there were few specialized physicians. Wheeler was often allowed to fly his father’s small planes—experiences that made a lifelong impression on him and taught him about the qualities and effects of light. “When I was growing up,” he has said, “the sky was everything for me.”

Upon entering the gallery, the viewer first encounters two luminous rectangular thresholds, or “walls,” of light, which function as points of entry into an expansive environment that produces the experience of limitless space, or a “ganzfeld,” where light appears to shift from day to night and back again. The viewer’s perception is heightened to a degree in which, as the artist articulates, “space appears as a volume, almost as matter.”

DN ND WD 180 EN - NY 24 represents a continuation of Wheeler’s pioneering light installations. After constructing his first absolute light environment in 1967 in his Venice Beach studio, in 1969, the artist showed his first such installation publicly at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. This work incorporated a “light wall” using a single row of daylight neon lights embedded inside a viewing aperture that encompassed the entire dimensions of the gallery wall within an enclosed space. A further light wall was installed at Tate Gallery in London the following year.

Wheeler has continued to explore similar effects by manipulating architecture in distinct ways and with different types of lighting, creating installations—including DN ND WD 180 EN - NY 24—that explore the perceptual possibilities of light and space, and in which the viewer experiences the sensation of entering an infinite void.